Consistent evidence points to the importance of the early childhood home environment for children's concurrent and subsequent development. Yet little is known about the long-term association between parental warmth in early childhood and children's social-emotional well-being in late childhood for children with and without disabilities. To explore…

Evidence has suggested that preschool and kindergarten experiences affect the cognitive and social-emotion development of language-minority students (LMS). This quantitative study aims to illustrate the LMS' preschool and kindergarten experience by investigating the preschool and kindergarten experience, family environment, and school environment.…

Both early childhood maternal language input and the quality of classroom instruction in elementary school have been shown to be important environmental supports in predicting children's literacy skill development. However, no studies have simultaneously examined these two environmental supports in relation to children's early language skills and…

Early fine motor ability is significantly associated with later achievement, even after controlling for typical child-level predictors of school outcomes. Previous longitudinal studies have confirmed this but typically have not included low-income, at-risk populations. Research has distinguished two different aspects of fine motor skills: those…

Dynamic Measurement Modeling (DMM) is a recently-developed measurement framework for gauging developing constructs (e.g., learning capacity) that conventional single-timepoint tests cannot assess. The current project developed a person-specific DMM Trajectory Deviance Index (TDI) that captures the aberrance of an individual's growth from the…

Researchers attempting to show that music has positive effects on children need to understand and control for preexisting differences between those who do and do not select into musical participation in the first place. Within a large-scale, communitywide, prospective, longitudinal study of predominantly low-income, ethnically diverse students (N…

Using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD), this dissertation examined the relationship between pre-K quality and children's academic achievement at 54 months and in first, third, and fifth grades, controlling for child and family covariates and the…

Background: The acquired skill set prior to school entry has emerged as an important issue in research and policy internationally. Much evidence exists advocating the importance of early numeracy and literacy skills in later academic achievement and economic outcomes of students. Aim: The goal of this study was to determine the association between…

Lervag and Hulme’s neuro-developmental theory and Wolf and Bowers’s double-deficit hypothesis were examined in this longitudinal study. A total of 130 children were tested in preschool and followed through fifth grade, when 84 remained in the study. During preschool and kindergarten the participants were given tests of end-sound discrimination…

The time-based resource-sharing model (P. Barrouillet, S. Bernardin, & V. Camos, 2004) assumes that during complex working memory span tasks, attention is frequently and surreptitiously switched from processing to reactivate decaying memory traces before their complete loss. Three experiments involving children from 5 to 14 years of age…

In this study, the researchers attempted to address the main hypothesis that diglossia may impede vocabulary growth of Lebanese bilingual students [in L1 Arabic], but they should eventually catch up in the upper cycle. A correlation design based on a two-stage random sample was used with 100 participants including pre-schoolers, first, second,…

In Experiment 1, Japanese children (4-, 5-, 7-, and 10-year-olds (n = 78)) and adults (n = 36), answered questions about the possibility of psychogenic bodily reactions, i.e., bodily outcomes with origins in the mind. The 4- and 5-year-old preschoolers typically denied that bodily conditions could originate in mental states. Developmentally,…

Many young children exhibit aggressive and disruptive behaviors at early ages. However, while aggressive behaviors are normative and serve as a way to communicate needs in the midst of developing verbal abilities, continued disruptive behavior can lead to stable or increasing levels of behavioral dysregulation, oppositionality and aggression.…

Purpose: The current work examined which theory of reading development, the "cumulative reading trajectory or the compensatory trajectory of development," most accurately represents the reading trajectories of children with language difficulties (LD) relative to their peers with typical language (TL) skills. Specifically, initial levels of reading…